Politics & Power Quote by Ernst Thalmann

The line reads like a deposition smuggled into history: not a plea for sympathy, but a forensic record of power doing what it does when it can no longer persuade. Thalmann, the German Communist leader and longtime Nazi prisoner, is describing interrogation as a political technology. “Every conceivable cruel method” is deliberately exhaustive, a rhetorical totality that denies the regime even the dignity of limits. It also preempts the skeptical shrug that victims are often met with: surely it wasn’t that bad; surely there were rules.

The key word is “blackmail,” not “torture.” Blackmail implies leverage, humiliation, the weaponization of private life. It suggests the Nazis weren’t only trying to break his body; they were trying to dirty his story, to turn him into an accomplice in his own undoing. “Obtain by force and at all costs” exposes the system’s real objective: not truth, but usable speech. Confessions are meant to be performed, circulated, archived - props for show trials, propaganda, and the bureaucratic fiction that enemies freely admit their guilt.

Then comes the sharpest subtext: “about comrades.” The cruelty isn’t confined to the individual; it radiates outward, aiming to rupture networks of loyalty and trust. Thalmann’s phrasing keeps faith with the collective even as he recounts the attempt to atomize him. In a regime obsessed with total control, forcing someone to name names is the cleanest way to convert a person into a weapon against their own side - and to make resistance feel morally radioactive.